5.1 Million Jobs Lost In Recession
From this morning’s “Economic News Release” out of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:
THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION: MARCH 2009
Nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline sharply in March (-663,000), and the unemployment rate rose from 8.1 to 8.5 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Since the recession began in December 2007, 5.1 million jobs have been lost, with almost two-thirds (3.3 million) of the decrease occurring in the last 5 months. In March, job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors.
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To illustrate just how bad the labor market has gotten since late 2007, MarketWatch published the following chart this morning:
Source: MarketWatch
Here’s hoping that the employment picture improves soon.
Sources:
Economic News Release
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 3, 2009
“5.1 million jobs lost in this recession so far”
Rex Nutting
MarketWatch, April 3, 2009
April 3rd, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Why does massive job loss continue despite massive injection of ’stimulus’ money into the economy?
Because there is no massive injection into the economy. It was injected into the banks, who proceeded to clean up their books a bit but without contributing anything good to the economy. Given this reality, one cannot count on the existing banking system, major and minor, to restore economic health for a few more years to come, assume they will get healthy by then.
But of course they won’t get healthy because there is now a negative bubble operating – competitive devaluation. As more and more things get busted up in the economy, bank assets, even those under good terms, will be marked down. And no amount of money pumped into them will fix things.
When will this end? We can look to economic history for guidance. I can’t think of a better example than Argentina. Before her economic crash Argentina owes huge external debt, just like the US. Bank of Argentina then print money, resulting in hyper-inflation, and a final crash. The people then took things over – they kicked out the bankers, barter among themselves, and took on themselves up to create a downsized but much more realistic economy. After a decade the country have repaired thing substantially. Today the bankers are no longer in charge. Nor are the Chicago School type economists and politicians – you know the guys who say laissez fair capitalism is the utopia of human condition.
April 4th, 2009 at 7:43 am
Thanks for the comment Einstein.
“When will this end? We can look to economic history for guidance. I can’t think of a better example than Argentina.”
The Argentina example is exactly the type of crash I was envisioning when I began this weblog almost two years ago.
May 6th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Official product inflation in Argentina is 10% but real product inflation is 22%.
The Argentinean government does not only fake inflation values but also unemployment rate values.
When they say 7% of unemployment it means that the real value is about 12%.
Since the global economy right now cannot help any first nor third world country, and also Argentinean presidents keep heavy-taxing exports, companies are really having a hard time employing people and selling products outside the country which is one of the main reasons that Argentinean unemployment is always high and growing.
The last but not least reason that unemployment will keep rising in Argentina is because presidents of Argentina are rising minimal wages to a point that a company cannot hire more than a half of people that the company really needs because they don’t have all that money to waste in unskilled labor force such as the Argentinean one.
So instead of hiring 2000 employees they hire 500 and make them work like they were 2000 so you have 1500 more unemployed people with no earnings at all and 500 people that are always super busy and get a first world country wage…
But i bet that those 500 employed ones don’t share their salary with the other 1500 unemployed people…
Argentina used to be the riches country in Latin America. Now it’s already becoming one of the poorest not only in Latin America but also in the whole World.
May 9th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Thanks for the comment ArgentinaFails.